The Definitions by Matt Greene Summary: A Quiet Dystopian Tale
TL;DR: A Quick Look at The Definitions
In this speculative dystopian novel, amnesiac adults at a seaside Centre try to rebuild identity through classes, rules, and relationships.
The story follows a narrator called “Discreet” as she forms bonds, confronts institutional control, and searches for meaning. Key themes include memory, language, and human connection.
The book is quiet, melancholic, and philosophical, blending absurd bureaucracy with intimate emotional longing.
Book Snapshot: The Definitions at a Glance
- Genre & Subgenre: Speculative Dystopian Fiction / Philosophical Fiction / Psychological Satire
- Core Narrative Tropes: Amnesiac Society, Institutional Isolation, Dystopian Schooling, Fictionalized Identity, Found Family
- Tone & Atmosphere: Deadpan, quiet, clinical yet poetic, absurd, and gently melancholic
- Primary Conflict: The struggle of matriculants to define themselves and form meaningful bonds within a rigid, totalizing institution
- Pacing Style: Episodic, reflective, character-driven, steadily escalating
- ISBN: 978-1250399342
- Pages: 176
- Book Structure: 4 Main Parts containing 19 Chapters (Part I: Chapters 1–9; Part II: Chapters 10–15; Part III: Chapters 16–18; Part IV: Chapter 19)
The Definitions Summary (Spoilers Ahead)
Spoilers warning: This section reveals major plot points and the ending of the book.
The story is narrated by an unnamed female matriculant classified as “Discreet.” After two months of quarantine, she is assigned to a dormitory bunk beneath Maria, a striking woman in the “Attractive” category.
Maria collects random objects—a seagull feather, pudding pots, soap sculptures—and constructs a personal mythology around her first memory of a supermarket mackerel. The narrator quickly forms a deep, unnamable attachment to Maria.
During Orientation, the narrator meets Chino, a tall man with a dollar-sign neck tattoo. He brings humor and physical comfort to the rigid environment.
Four times a week, all matriculants descend to underground laboratories. There they are injected with dark blue dye and fitted with electrode helmets while viewing abstract slideshows.
As lessons progress, subtle social hierarchies emerge. Maria struggles in Art class under Mr. Andreas, who publicly ridicules her ambiguous, multi-perspective drawings.
When Maria develops a hardened, horn-like wart on her toe, she pressures a meek matriculant named Gunther to bite it off. Later, a matriculant named Anita claims to remember a vivid memory of a white dog and a yellow ball.
Although widely doubted, Anita’s consistent story introduces widespread listlessness and existential questioning. Administrators respond by installing mirrors in the washrooms, sparking intense self-scrutiny.
Chino becomes convinced that the matriculants are actually manufactured robots sustained on blue dye. Meanwhile, Maria distances herself from the narrator to pair up with Joey, a handsome “Data Analyst” candidate.
Seeking connection, the narrator begins passing folded notes and sitting on outdoor benches with other matriculants, first Eddie and later Kathy. Kathy is a red-haired woman who knits her a pair of green mittens.
Their intimacy deepens during private nights on a foam crashmat inside the empty Barn. Simultaneously, Anita and Ursula fall ill with pregnancy-like symptoms. Ursula abruptly vanishes from the Centre without explanation.
Chino’s mental state deteriorates as he becomes obsessed with the limitations of language and dual perspectives. He draws duck-rabbit ambiguous figures and covers sheets of paper with dense hieroglyphic symbols.
During a mandatory presentation in Preparations for Re-entry, Chino performs a silent, bizarre hand pantomime. The class laughs wildly. Punished by instructors, Chino suffers a severe mental breakdown and is forcibly re-sedated.
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The treatment wipes his memory entirely. He returns to the cohort under the new name Raymond, completely forgetting his past friendship with the narrator.
Before final examinations, Maria leads the narrator into the library and opens the encyclopedia to medical diagrams of pregnancy and embryology. During the final exam, which consists of a single prompt—”Who do you love?”—the narrator writes “Kathy” and walks out.
When graduation lists are posted, Maria, Joey, Eddie, and Chandler graduate and leave the facility. The narrator and Kathy fail to graduate and are retained for another year.
Years pass. The narrator takes a job in the Centre’s bakery. Raymond eventually departs after participating in a pilot program that implants pre-fabricated synthetic memories.
Now older, the narrator reflects on her past, her lingering memories of Maria, and her walks along the double perimeter fence. Sitting outside the bakery, she feeds a small bird a muffin crumb and realizes the world is a gift.
She writes down her story as an act of closure, concluding with a plea for forgiveness and a desire to start again. This is the ending of Matt Greene’s The Definitions.
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Summary by Chapter (Spoilers)
This section provides a brief summary of each chapter for readers who want to explore what’s inside. The book has 4 main parts and 19 chapters in total.
Part I
Chapter 1 Following her two-month quarantine, the narrator is assigned to a dormitory room where she meets her bunkmate, Maria. Maria displays a collection of random physical objects on her mattress and recites personal lists of preferences.
She attempts to construct a personal mythology centered around her first memory of a staring mackerel in a supermarket basket. Maria takes the narrator to the library to view a faded encyclopedia photograph of children.
Chapter 2 The text outlines the medical parameters of the viral infection and antivirals. The virus causes retrospective loss of episodic memories while preserving semantic, procedural, and embodied memory. A catastrophic global data breach destroyed all external personal records, leaving no data to verify identities.
Chapter 3 The narrator attends Orientation and meets Chino, a tall matriculant with a dollar-sign neck tattoo. When the narrator faces anxiety choosing feelings from an illustration board, Chino makes a funny whinnying face to relieve her stress. Chino demonstrates a physical exercise of pressing his hands together to hold an invisible, expanding sphere.
Chapter 4 Regular academic classes begin, covering subjects such as Politeness, Ethics, History, Maths, Biology, and Poetry. Politeness class teaches indirect requests and extreme behavioral restraint. Ethics class covers Kantian deontology and the absolute moral prohibition against lying.
Chapter 5 Matriculants become deeply concerned with physical appearance and personal grooming. Maria discovers a hardened, horn-like yellow wart on her small toe and finger and asks the narrator to bite it off. The narrator hesitates out of anxiety, causing Maria to retract the request as a joke.
Chapter 6 This brief chapter lists various natural occurrences of triangular shapes. Triangles are noted in mountain peaks, beech tree seed pods, and melon cavities. They are also observed on birthmarks found on matriculants’ wrists.
Chapter 7 Staff assign matriculants to operational categories like “Tall”, “Attractive”, or “Discreet” to standardize their care. Art teacher Mr. Andreas singles out Maria and publicly mocks her perspective-reversed drawing of a girl tying a ribbon. Upset by the incident, Maria paces angrily in the corridor.
Chapter 8 The narrative explains how matriculants select names from old television cartridges. Gunther, named after a sitcom character, is revealed as the person who bit off Maria’s toe wart. In the canteen, Maria and Chino pressure Gunther about whether he would eat a pudding pot lid.
Chapter 9 Four times a week, matriculants undergo brain scans in an underground bunker laboratory. They are injected with dark blue dye, fitted with electrode helmets, and shown abstract images.
Outside the scan room, Gunther nervously asks the narrator if the dye allows doctors to see recent memories and actions.
Part II
Chapter 10 In English class, Ms. Symonds strays from grammar to tell long, wandering personal stories. She recounts a failed childhood ballet exam overseen by her strict mother and a story about her dying scientist father. Her father advised her on his deathbed that “why” is less important than “what then” and that one must never regret.
Chapter 11 Matriculants study the pocket handbook Necessary and Useful Terms in Preparation for a Successful Reintegration. The narrator and Chino meet daily on outdoor benches to record new words from pudding pot lids. They engage in an extended philosophical debate regarding the exact defining criteria of a chair versus a bench.
Chapter 12 Sudden memory restorations occur in huddles across the Centre, though most prove to be fabrications. Anita claims to remember a white dog, a fuzzy yellow ball, and a ham-like tongue. Unlike others, Anita maintains her exact story without adding embellishments, creating widespread doubt and listlessness.
Chapter 13 Chino interrupts Ethics class and pulls the narrator into an empty room to share a new theory. He excitedly asserts that all matriculants are actually manufactured robots sustained on blue dye injections. He cites the uniform memories, lack of children, and constant scanning as evidence.
Chapter 14 Matriculants begin passing folded paper notes; Eddie passes notes to the narrator and invites her to sit on the benches. As washroom curtains are added, Maria becomes distant and focuses entirely on mastering her reflection in mirrors. The narrator meets Eddie on the benches, where they watch a distant ship on the horizon.
Chapter 15 Maria completely cuts off contact with the narrator, pairing up socially with Joey. The narrator passes notes to other matriculants, including Ross, meeting them on benches and under blankets during cartridge screenings. Tensions erupt in the washroom when the narrator confronts Maria; the narrator shoves Maria and gets slapped across the face.
Part III
Chapter 16 Speculation spreads regarding Ursula’s sudden disappearance, while Chino’s schedule becomes chaotic with endless administrative changes.
Due to frequent tardiness, Chino is forced to spend his free time copying notes in the lounge. The narrator meets Chino behind the kitchen, where he presents a detailed drawing of a rabbit that shifts into a duck.
Chapter 17 Chino withdraws from social life, filling pages with dense hieroglyphic drawings and symbolic pictures stored under his mattress. The narrator begins meeting Kathy, a red-haired matriculant who knits green mittens for her. They spend quiet evenings together lying on a foam crashmat in the empty Barn.
Chapter 18 Chino’s mental state worsens as he dissolves paper drawings on his tongue and spits purple foam. In Preparations for Re-entry class, Joey presents a plan to work as a Data Analyst while living with Maria.
Chino delivers an elaborate, silent pantomime using his hands that causes wild laughter before Ms. Crudup removes him.
Part IV
Chapter 19 Graduation lists are posted; Maria, Joey, Eddie, and Chandler graduate, while the narrator and Kathy are retained for another year.
Following a violent breakdown, Chino is re-sedated, loses his memory again, and returns under the name Raymond. Years pass as the narrator works in the Centre’s bakery while Raymond eventually departs via a synthetic memory implant scheme.
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Characters in The Definitions
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| The Narrator | The unnamed protagonist, categorized as “Discreet”, who observes and chronicles the cohort’s journey. |
| Maria | The narrator’s initial dormitory bunkmate, categorized as “Attractive”, who constructs a personal identity from objects and memories. |
| Chino / Raymond | A tall matriculant with a dollar-sign neck tattoo who theorizes about their existence and later has his memory wiped. |
| Kathy (#6682) | A kind, practical matriculant with red hair who becomes the narrator’s romantic partner. |
| Eddie (#6247) | A polite, timid matriculant who initiates contact with the narrator by passing folded notes. |
| Gunther | A pale, translucent man named after the Friends character who is pressured into biting off Maria’s toe wart. |
| Anita (#3344) | An ambitious matriculant who triggers institutional doubt by recounting a fixed memory of a white dog and a yellow ball. |
| Ursula | An influential dresser in the dorms who falls ill with pregnancy symptoms and mysteriously vanishes. |
| Joey (#2647) | A charming, stoic, and attractive matriculant who pairs up with Maria. |
| Ross (#3332 / #11117) | A tall matriculant who refused to climb a rope in PE and later exchanges notes with the narrator. |
| Ms. Symonds | The eccentric English teacher with flame-colored hair who tells wandering stories about her family. |
| Mr. Andreas | The square-jawed Art instructor who enforces strict perspective rules. |
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Beneath the Surface: What The Definitions Explores
| Theme | How the book presents it |
|---|---|
| Identity and the Construction of Personal Mythology | Deprived of genuine biographical memories, characters collect physical objects, adopt names from old media, and construct fictional backstories to anchor themselves. |
| The Imperfection and Paradox of Language | Language acts as a rigid, artificial mold that attempts to contain fluid human thought. Words are inherently imprecise and often fail to express exact emotional realities. |
| Institutional Control vs. Human Connection | The Centre classifies human behavior through absurd curricula, arbitrary categories, and constant scanning. Matriculants seek unauthorized connection through passed notes and secret meetings. |
| Perception, Ambiguity, and Dual Realities | Chino’s duck-rabbit drawing and the debate over chairs versus benches illustrate that objects and situations can hold multiple, contradictory meanings depending on perspective. |
Books Like The Definitions
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro — Shares a quietly melancholic narrative voice, an institutional setting where young people are raised under ambiguous rules, and a poignant exploration of identity and love.
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa — Features a surreal, allegorical atmosphere focused on the systemic loss of memory and the struggle to preserve personal objects and meaning.
A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball — Explores a mysterious recovery facility where individuals re-learn how to live, speak, and process emotions through rigid, minimalist instruction.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke — Mirrors the gentle, earnest innocence of a narrator navigating a vast, isolated environment and holding onto beauty despite isolation.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel — Examines how individuals cling to memory, art, and pop-culture fragments to build new personal mythologies after a world-altering catastrophe.
